Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society

The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society

Larkin, Thomas

Paperback

Series: Nancy Bernkopf Tucker and Warren I. Cohen Book on American-E

Business GeneralChinese HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0231210671
ISBN13: 9780231210676
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Mar 19 2024
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.09
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong-based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm's rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China's American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.

Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.

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